Chapter 26
By the time Tuesday evening rolled around, I was ready.
Buffed, polished, shaved—you name it. My purple dress fit like a dream and concealed the same purple bra Malone had seen once before.
I was even wearing the matching underwear, but I’d given careful consideration to not doing so—it would’ve been so much fun to see the look on his face if I stuffed it in his pocket.
Despite his accounting adventures, he had finagled a ticket for Nana, so I wore Converse underneath the dress. Not as sexy as the strappy sandals, but so much more comfortable.
And my sneakers were good for pacing, which was what I was doing because it was five thirty-five, and I hadn’t heard from or seen Malone since a text the night before.
Brené Brown watched me pace from her perch on top of the love seat, her tiny, fuzzy head tracking my motion as I paced toward the patio door and then back toward the apartment door.
Finally, the doorbell rang.
“You be good,” I said to the cat before turning my attention to the door.
Malone walked in, his hair still wet from the shower. “Stark, could you please help me with this torture device?”
“Can’t. It goes against my religion to dress you.”
He arched an eyebrow, the one over his blue eye. “The sooner you get me dressed, the sooner you can get me undressed.”
“Well, when you put it like that,” I said as I stepped closer. When I breathed in his vanilla bourbon chai cologne, my fingers fumbled, but I recovered enough to fix his bow tie.
“Not usually a suit kind of guy,” he said as I straightened it.
“You look awfully good in a suit, but you also look good in sweats. I’d say you’re very versatile in that way, Malone.”
“Well, let me take a look at you, then.”
I stepped back and curtsied. “It’s your favorite color.”
He made a sound that wasn’t quite a word, more an appreciative grunt of choked admiration.
“And it has pockets!” I said with a twirl.
He laughed. “What is it with women and pockets?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t know. You’ve always got pockets. They even put pockets in some swim trunks, as if that isn’t an invitation to accidentally take one’s wallet and phone into a pool.”
“You’re right about—are those tennis shoes?”
I stood up straight, prepared to defend my footwear choice. “They’re sparkly. And sparkly means fancy.”
I waited for him to complain, but instead he shook his head in amusement before pointing at the puzzle piece on the wall. “See? Intriguing.”
By this time, Brené Brown had come to inspect her favorite human. Malone bent and scooped her up.
“Stop it! You’re going to get cat hair all over your suit,” I said.
“But she’s so cute.”
“Her name is Brené Brown.” I took the kitten from him but held her away from my body as I walked her back to the bathroom. Not only did I not quite trust her to have the run of the apartment while I was gone, but I also had a lint roller in there.
“Come on, Stark,” he said a few minutes later, as I attacked his suit with the roller. “I’m the one who has to perform, not you.”
I laid a hand along his jaw. “Oh, my sweet summer child. I am your date. You will be judged by me, which is why I almost didn’t wear the tennis shoes, but . . . I hate heels.”
“No one’s gonna be looking at your feet,” he said before pointedly directing his gaze to my cleavage. “In fact, let’s just skip the whole thing . . .”
“Nope,” I said. “We go. You play nice with Gramps. We get free food and free booze. We come home. We get naked. That’s the plan.”
He winced. “There are so many reasons why I only like the last part of that plan.”
“Come on. You can tell me on the way.”
As we drove to the Hilton, Malone told me about how he’d flown to the Caymans and then to Wyoming in search of information. He’d come up empty both times.
“Because you were looking for shell companies and had some reason to believe Blake might be in town to create one, dissolve one, or just visit Old Faithful,” I said.
“I can’t get anything past you, can I?”
“And shell companies are a great way to hide, launder, or embezzle money. Or to avoid paying taxes.”
“High marks, Ms. Stark. We’ll make a forensic accountant out of you yet.”
“No thanks. I took one accounting class so I could handle the books for the PI business, and it’s not my ministry. Come to think of it, I can’t wait for Ken to come asking me to do the taxes next year. That’s going to be a big fat no.”
“All that and brains, too.”
“Laying it on thick, aren’t you?” I said. “I mean, keep it up. Flattery will get you everywhere.”
“Oh, keeping it up isn’t going to be a problem. Keeping it down until it’s time to get it up is going to be the problem.”
I couldn’t help but grin. “You’re incorrigible.”
“And you love me for it.”
That I do.
Nope. Not even. Uh-huh. No L-word. Time to change the subject. “I still bet you that Blake makes an appearance.”
Malone snorted. “He’s not that stupid.”
“I told you. It’s not about being stupid. He tricked you into thinking he was somewhere else. He probably thinks he’s destroyed all the evidence you’ve been collecting, so why not?”
He opened his mouth to speak but then closed it.
“Speaking of, Malone, what do you have on your cousin?”
“I can’t tell you, it’s—”
“Classified,” we said together.
“But who am I going to tell? I’ve served the papers, but I wish I could help Trista get her hands on some of the money he took from their joint funds.”
He stared out at a sea of brake lights. I gave him time to consider.
He had plenty because there was a wreck up ahead.
Thanks to both the accident and rush-hour traffic, it was going to take us twenty minutes to go five miles.
Finally, he said, “There was a security breach a few years back, and Grandpa called my company in to both investigate and shore up security.”
“Okay,” I said.
“We found the source, a nasty piece of malware, and I strongly suspected Blake was behind it at the time, but I couldn’t prove anything.”
“And he’s somehow used the info from that breach to embezzle money?”
Malone winced. “Yes. So after the malware, he used a SQL injection to—”
“I’m going to stop you right there,” I said. “You can go through all your computer jargon, and it will sound like Farsi to me, so to sum up: He hacked his own company and has been benefiting ever since, so they called you in again.”
“That’s the long and the short of it,” Malone had to admit. “I’ve tracked down two shell companies, countless fraudulent invoices, deliberate misconfigurations—”
“English, Malone. English.”
“My cousin did a bunch of shady shit, but I have to connect all the dots and then show my work.”
“Better.”
“Good. Am I still getting laid tonight?”
“Absolutely. I’m sure you can explain all that to me later tonight in a technical way, and it will be like sweet nothings. For now, though, I’m just trying to get a clear picture of what Blake did.”
“That’s the problem. Even worse, someone distracted me, so I hadn’t taken a picture of my wall in a few days. I’ve got to redo some of the work I’d already done.”
“Sorry not sorry?”
“One of my hard drives didn’t back up to the cloud, either.
It’s a mess. Definitely more complicated than usual, which makes me think he’s not working alone.
He has to have someone else on the inside who’s helping him, because while he may not be stupid, he also isn’t that bright.
For example, I would’ve skipped the haircut if I were him. ”
“That’s because you’re not a raging narcissist.”
“True.”
A car jumped in front of him. He neither cursed nor gestured nor questioned their parentage. I was impressed. Had I been driving, I would’ve called that person everything but a child of God. In multiple languages.
“Well, fifty dollars still says he shows up tonight,” I said.
“I think you’re wrong there, Stark. He wouldn’t dare.”
“He would. In fact, he will,” I said.
“Fine. I’ll take that bet,” Malone said.
“Now, tell me about the ex. I take my obligations seriously, too.”
He groaned. “Must I?”
“I gotta know who I’m figuratively punching.”
“Fine. When I came to Atlanta to look into the data breach, I met Grandpa’s personal assistant.”
“Why do I think this story isn’t going to end well?”
“Because you’re a smart woman. When I met Selena, I was sure she was the one.
We dated long distance for a couple of years, with a lot of flying between Atlanta and California, and I’d proposed.
I had even researched opening a branch of my company in Atlanta so we could live here. Then she dumped me.”
“So she is not a smart woman.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said with a chuckle as we inched through traffic.
“And she’s the one who was so hateful about your eyes.”
“Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “She also said I lacked ambition, was a poor dresser, and was an out-of-shape slob.”
“And you want me to smile in her face rather than smack her?”
“Yes.”
I practically pulsed with anger. “Wait a minute. Lack ambition? You’re the cofounder of Chateau Cybersecurity.”
“Someone’s done her homework.”
“And I can assure you that you are neither a slob nor out of shape,” I said, squirming in my seat at the memory of our mostly naked dining room table encounter. Meals hadn’t been the same since.
“Ah, well, I may have ramped up my workout game with the hopes of winning her back.”
My stomach roiled. “So you invited me to make her jealous enough she would reconsider?”
“Winning her back was the original plan,” he said. “But I scrapped it the day I ran into an intriguing woman who was looking for a ‘Man in Finance.’”
I felt a stab of something. Wanting? Hoping?
Remember that this is a short-term arrangement. Keep it light.
“Which is funny because I am not looking for a man in finance.”
“That’s good,” he said. “I mean, you did find a man who plays with numbers all day, but . . .”
His voice trailed off as we turned into the hotel’s parking lot. The valet, bless him, opened my door before I could say or do anything stupid.
Get it together, Stella.
As much as I hated to admit it, Havisham had to be right. If going this long without sex made me an emotional mess, then I was going to have to find a long-term friend with benefits after Malone left.
After he handed off his keys, he met me on the other side of the car and offered his arm. We entered the hotel, and I almost groaned with pleasure at the wave of air-conditioning that rushed over us.
“You can’t make sounds like that until after the party,” Malone whispered in my ear.
Okay, so I did groan with pleasure.
“I can make no promises,” I said. “My love affair with air-conditioning is well known.”
We passed through the lobby and headed down a carpeted hall, eventually coming to the end of a line of formally dressed people.
Great. From automobile traffic to people traffic. Thank goodness I’d worn the Converse.
Malone leaned over to say softly, “You’re about to come face-to-face with my ex sooner rather than later.”
We inched forward.
Unlike Malone, I couldn’t see that far ahead of me. I took a step to the side and craned my neck to see a model-thin woman with tawny skin and long, straight black hair standing at the door with a clipboard. She was the opposite of me in every way: tall, slender, fashionable, reserved.
Stella, it doesn’t matter. “Opposite” doesn’t mean more or less than.
I could tell myself that, but making Malone’s ex jealous felt nigh impossible, so I redirected my attention to finding Blake.
He wasn’t in line. He could’ve already been in the ballroom, but I doubted it.
He struck me as the kind to run late so all eyes would be on him when he entered—especially since he didn’t know about all Malone’s backups.
Finally, it was our turn to check in, and I was face-to-face with the woman who’d broken Malone’s heart. I put on my best smile, but I couldn’t control what my eyes said.
“Selena,” Malone said with a nod.
“Ty! So good to see you.” She put her clipboard to her side so she could wrap him in a hug.
Apparently, he’d shared his first name with her. Apparently, she’d chosen a nickname rather than calling him Malone. I found that irrationally irritating on his behalf.
Even so, there was no way I would ever be able to make this sleek-haired goddess jealous. What had Malone been thinking?
The goddess turned and extended her hand to me. “I’m so sorry to ignore you. I’m Selena.”
“Stella,” I said, shaking her hand a tad more forcefully than I had to.
“Nice to meet you, Stella.” She turned to Malone and, honest to God, giggled. “Do you only date women with names that begin with S?”
“Looks like,” said Malone.
“Well, it’s good to see you with a plus-one.”
He draped an arm around my shoulders. “Amazing how life sometimes plops the perfect person just across the breezeway.”
My heart skipped a beat at the word “perfect.”
Stop it, Stella. It’s part of the act. Now smile. Innocently.
“Yes. Amazing.” Her smile stayed in place, but her eyes took on a more calculating gleam. They flicked toward my cleavage. Ha! There was one point—well, two, really—in my favor.
My body, meanwhile, had leaned into Malone like a plant toward the sun.
“Well.” Selena cleared her throat in a dainty yet authoritative way. “I’ve checked you off the guest list, so . . . have fun.”
“We will,” Malone said, his arm sliding down my shoulders to settle at the small of my back. I shivered with anticipation of our postparty Finnegan.
How little time could we spend here?